Bracing for growth in Boerne and beyond

Express-News Editorial Board

October 9, 2017

Photo: Kin Man Hui /San Antonio Express-News

Boerne resident Natalie Sales strolls along River Road Park on Sept. 28. Sales and her husband moved into the town over four years ago. Boerne's population has tripled in the last three decades. Over 5,000 new homes are planned over the next several years. Kendall County was the second fastest-growing county in the U.S. among those with population sizes of 10,000 or more. That spells the need for smart growth.

Boerne resident Natalie Sales strolls along River Road Park on...

People are moving to Boerne in droves.

They are drawn to this Hill Country town, just 30 miles northwest of San Antonio, for its outstanding schools, gorgeous scenery and easy quality of life. It’s a place where you can stretch out and see the stars, stroll past old buildings on Main Street and feed the ducks waddling along River Road Park.

It’s a good life in Boerne, and that’s why people keep moving there. But with the new rooftops comes traffic; and with more people come convenience stores, strip malls and chains.

Life is changing in Boerne as the San Antonio region grows and sprawls.

This is a basic reality across the Hill Country as the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area continues to grow. Already at 2.4 million people, the region is expected to add 1 million more by 2040, putting enormous pressure on our roads, infrastructure and water supplies.

“All of us want Boerne to stay Boerne,” Boerne Deputy City Manager Jeff Thompson told Davila. But “To say there will be no growth in Boerne is just completely unrealistic.”

At least 5,000 new homes are expected in and around Boerne over the next 15 years. That’s a big deal in a city whose population is about 15,000. It’s a big deal in Kendall County, where the population is more than 40,000.

That means needing more teachers, emergency responders and service workers. It means more affordable housing and traffic control. It means more water. It means more crime. It means building more schools.

While these growth challenges are daunting, leaders and elected officials from across the region can take some valuable lessons from Boerne’s growing pains.

Foremost is the need to empower counties to better manage growth. And that means convincing state legislators.

Much of the growth around Boerne is in the unincorporated county where the taxes and building costs are lower than in cities.

This is a familiar dynamic across the region. Counties have very limited planning and zoning authority, which is an invitation to sprawl and poor planning.

State lawmakers, who have aggressively curbed city annexation, should at least empower counties to properly zone and manage this coming growth. Otherwise, it’s going to be bottleneck city out there.

The next lesson is that we are all in this together. When people think about growth, they think about San Antonio, the nation’s seventh largest city. But it is the entire region that will grow, and that means growing — intelligently — together.

We have to be thinking as one region, and working toward regional solutions to our growing pains. Residents who live in Boerne might very well work in San Antonio — most recent estimates peg more than 6,400 daily work trips from Kendall to Bexar County. And residents in San Antonio might very well fill many of these needed positions in fast-growing Boerne.

Put another way: We drive on each others’ roads. We visit each others’ parks. The broader region relies on the colleges, universities and hospitals in Bexar County. And the growth in Bexar County is going to dramatically change the broader region.

We’re in this together and need to be partnering on smart-growth policies. That means persuading the Legislature to give us the tools to do that.